The worst thing about thesecommemorations of John Lennon's Anything is that many of us feel the need to mark the day by heaping scorn on Yoko Ono. Can we cut this out, please?

It blows my mind that people who ought to know better continue to blame Ono for the breakup of the biggest band in the world. By '71, Lennon was sufficiently estranged from his former musical partner that he could write a song as vicious as this one about him. Ono didn't pen those lines about Paul McCartney. Lennon did it himself.

It's tempting to thing that if she wasn't an oddball contemporary artist, or outspoken, that we'd all be able to embrace Yoko Ono by now. I'm afraid that's probably not so. Sadly, we still view classic bands as clubs with No Girls Allowed signs nailed to their doors. Any woman brave enough to barge in was going to be made a scapegoat. Ono found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she's still suffering for it. Consider: even noted rock critic Mike Francesa felt the need to question Ono's talent during his WFAN call-in show yesterday.

Next to "Rubber Soul," Ono's "Season of Glass" plays pretty thin. But so do almost everybody else's albums. Elvis Costello thought enough of "Walking on Thin Ice" to cover it. Out of Lennon's shadow, Ono's talents were right in line with what we've come to expect from college rockers with mild experimental tendencies. In my opinion, Ono's synthpop records compare favorably to, say, those by the Knife or Fever Ray.

That is far beside the point, though, because Lennon's assassination obliterated Yoko Ono's ability to make independent aesthetic statements. Her career as a pop artist was destroyed thirty years ago. Even her supporters have a tough time seeing her as anything other than a Beatle widow.

So these anniversaries can't be easy days for her, and the last thing she needs is opprobrium from Beatles fans with misdirected rage. If you can't have sympathy for a woman whose husband was murdered by a nut, try this: show some respect for the person John Lennon loved. Surely that's what he would have wanted us to do. Thirty years after the shooting, Ono remains a bigger punching bag than Mark David Chapman. That's sick. It ought to end, right now.

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